I’m sure you all remember the accidental leak of Krystal’s appearance in Brawl. That event brought to light that Alésia Glidewell had her own website. I contacted her via email a few days after the leak and asked her for an interview. And she accepted! For now, I’ve sent her a series of questions via email for her to answer when she can. Every week or two, I’ll put up another two or three questions and answers. All this leads up until sometime in February, after Brawl is released, when I will be doing an interview with Alésia Glidewell in person! It will probably be put in a special edition of the podcast.

Edit: To clarify, she is not allowed to answer questions about Brawl-related issues until the interview in February, after the game is out.

For our first questions, I asked about how she got started voice acting.

  • KA: Could you tell us a little about yourself?

    AG: I was born in Hawaii and raised as a ‘company brat’ so we moved around a lot. I grew up in Saudi Arabia, Florida, Brazil, Mexico… and more. After finishing high school in Boston I went to college at Emory University in Atlanta and studied Cultural Anthropology. I graduated in 2000 and lived in Mexico City until I moved to Seattle in 2002. Then I went to the University of Washington’s audio production program and started freelancing on indie films and corporate videos.

  • KA: How did you first become involved in voice acting?

    AG: The first voice over job I ever did was in Miami Florida when I was twelve. I got the job through my acting agent without even auditioning. All I had to do was say, “Hi Dad, I’m home.” I was in and out of the session in under 15 minutes, got paid 400 bucks and when I got out I told my mom that this is what I wanted to do when I grew up. I forgot all about that experience until recently when my mother brought it up over Thanksgiving.

    Actually, it took me two years of hard work and classes here in Seattle just to get a non-paid gig, let alone a paying one. After a year of small voice over jobs here and there I got a call from an agency called the Actors Group and after I got in with them I started auditioning from home for bigger voice-over gigs and games.

  • KA: You’ve done a lot of voice acting for video games. How is that different from other types of voice acting?

    AG: It’s a lot more fun, but it’s also more difficult. Most of the other voice-overs I do are commercials and industrials. For commercials I’m usually in and out within a half hour and don’t get to scream and yell or play around with my voice too much. Same thing with industrials but they’re usually longer. The best thing about games is getting to see the characters come to life and actually do and say the things that I’m mimicking in the studio. Sometimes I get to work with a partial animation but most of the time I just have sketches of the character and the director’s description. Overall though, games are just a lot more fun because I get to experiment more and even be silly sometimes.